Reflections of Victorian Aesthetics in Adam of St Victor’s Sequences

The subject of this article is the aesthetic thought that Adam of St Victor included in his liturgical poetry in the form of a sequence. The content of the article consists of two parts, the first discusses an outline of the aesthetic views of the main masters of the Victorine school, Hugh and Richard, to which Adam belongs, in order to show in the second part how these ideas function in his Sequences. In outlining the aesthetic theory, two main ideas of Hugh’s are relevant to the Sequences under analysis: pan-aestheticism in terms of the inclusion of all five senses (in addition to sight and hearing, these include smell, taste and touch) in the perception of beauty, and the classification of categories of beauty (laid out in the treatise De tribus diebus). The analyses carried out show that Adam of St Victor was a faithful disciple of the school, especially of the master Hugh, and in his writing he drew on the achievements of his illustrious predecessors, as is evident in the range of aesthetic views analysed here.